The IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference is an annual meeting that traces its history back to 1948. It is organized by the IEEE, which is a large, international, non-profit, professional organization. The average attendance is around 1000 -1100 people, with their primary interest equally divided between the Nuclear Science Symposium (NSS) portion and Medical Imaging Conference (MIC) portions of the meeting. Broadly speaking, the main topic area of the MIC is nuclear medical imaging (mostly PET and SPECT), although there are an increasing number of papers on x-ray techniques. The emphasis is on detectors, imaging systems and algorithms for image reconstruction and image quantitation. A large fraction of the attendees derive some funding from NIH, primarily through NIBIB or NCI. The duration of the MIC portion of the meeting is 5 days. The 2004 scientific program consisted of approximately 430 poster presentations, approximately 66 contributed oral presentations, and 2 invited plenary presentations. In addition, there are a number of educational Short Courses that are available to attendees for an additional fee. Last year there were three full-day courses and three half-day classes related to medical imaging. More information on the conference is available at http://www.nss-mic.org/. We request $20,000 in support for the 2005 meeting, which will be held in Puerto Rico on Oct. 23-29, 2005. The support will go exclusively to students and postdoctoral fellows via two programs: 1) partial subsidy of travel and registration expenses and 2) significantly discounted "tuition" for Short Courses. The goal is to encourage more students, especially minority students and women, to participate in the conference, with the ultimate aim of helping them establish their careers in medical imaging science. This conference grant will reduce the financial barriers for these young investigators to attend the conference by paying a portion of their travel expenses. In addition, we would like to enable more MIC students and post docs to take Short Courses, and thus would offer them a heavily discounted price for Short Courses. We plan to spend $17,000 on travel awards (23 to 34 awards of $500 to $750 each) and $3,000 on Short Course tuitions (16 tuitions discounted by $250 for 1-day courses and $125 for 1/2-day courses). The exact number of awards and the amount of each award will depend on the number of applications that we receive.